


The Body Politic

by Arsenic



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, discussions of previous non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-15 21:26:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15421920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/Arsenic
Summary: For a long time now, Dick has thought of his body as just another tool in his arsenal.  Jason's not comfortable with that.





	The Body Politic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pentapus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentapus/gifts).



> Thanks for the fantastic prompt, Penta, I had so much fun writing this!! I hope you had a great time modding this exchange, because I had a great time participating, and really appreciate you putting it together in part.
> 
> Big thanks to carbonjen for the beta, anything that doesn't make sense or seems out of place is because I willfully ignored her advice.
> 
> Canon notes: this kind of assumes Dick is either with the Titans or in the League, and that Jason, if he isn't still with his N52 team, was with them at a certain point and is still friendly with them. Otherwise, feel free to place this wherever it works best for you.

Jason is never doing another favor for Roy or Kori again. _Get out of Gotham for a bit,_ they said, _see the stars,_ they said. Yeah. Or Jason could be stuck repping the Titans and the Justice League--teams he’s not even on, mind you--during diplomatic negotiations for a trade treaty. Not to mention watching Dick do his world-famous "clench my teeth in something that approximates a smile" while the ambassador gets handsy with him over dinner the first night they’ve arrived.

Worse, Dick throws that not-smile directly at Jason, which is a clear signal that Jason's not going to get to punch anyone in the scrotum, let alone shoot them there. Jason grits his teeth right back, and doesn't throw his salad fork into anyone's eye.

He's a fucking prince among men, he is.

*

"Are you bleeding?" Dick asks as they're walking back to the suite of rooms provided to them by the Brylyxian High Command.

"No," Jason says.

Dick reaches out, but Jason evades. Dick is insanely fast, generally quicker than Jason. However, after an evening of practicing actual fucking mantras to keep from bringing significant technological exchange talks to a halt by killing someone with a dessert spoon, Jason is dead intent on not being touched. It's the one thing in this situation he can control.

Dick blinks at his flinch reaction. "Whoa, Jay. Just. Look at your hand, okay?"

Jason puts his hands out in front of him, and okay, yeah, that's blood. He might have put the salad fork in his own palm without any allowable targets for it. He does this sometimes, has since coming back. It's not dissociation, not exactly, but there can be times where he just loses touch with his own body, as if it's a car he's traveling in, rather than his own bones and nerves and flesh.

"Huh," he says. He doesn't bother offering anything else. Jason is a great liar and all, but Dick is a better bullshit detector.

"Huh," Dick echoes, considerably less casually.

Jason shakes his head, a quick, sharp action. "It's not someone else who's bleeding. Take it as a gift, Dickwing."

For a second it looks like Dick is going to push. Then he backs off. "Just be sure to clean it out and patch it."

Jason can take care of himself. It's other people who make things tricky.

*

Dick showers longer than he should and allows himself to run the water at a hotter temperature than is healthy against human skin. He knows it goes like this sometimes. It's not the first time he's needed to turn on the charm and tune out the touch of another's hand where he'd prefer it not be. Sometimes that's just the job, as it were. He's frustrated that it never seems to get easier, the way taking a hit does, or leaping off a building, but everyone has things they don't like about their work.

It's harder with Jason here, watching Dick like he's one of Jason's Crime Alley girls, whose consent to be touched is bought with cash and other commodities. For all his complaints that the family only sees in black-and-white, Jason can be pretty single minded himself when it comes to people touching anyone he views as his. Jason can naysay all he wants: if he didn't view the other Bats as his, didn’t view Dick as his, he wouldn't have agreed to fill in as a second on a diplomatic trade mission, Roy's puppy eyes and Kori's smile or not. Jason is here to watch over Dick, because Dick is Jason’s, to Jason’s way of viewing things. Dick can see it in the flash of homicidal intent in Jason’s eyes every time the ambassador opens his mouth, in the small stab wounds gracing Jason’s palm. Dick isn’t always great at reading other people, but he has spent the last few years watching Jason, waiting for opportunities to connect with him, make Jason one of the Bats again, so he knows Jason. He knows what possessiveness and the drive to protect looks like on him.

Dick appreciates that Jason came. If things go to shit, he's going to need Jason. He just wishes Jason could dial up his chill from negative three to maybe a plus two for the few days it's going to take to get this deal hammered out. That's all.

Dick makes himself turn off the water. By the time Jason starts complaining that he really needs to use the toilet, Dick's skin has almost lost its too-red tinge.

*

By morning Jason can stand to be touched again—by Dick, that is—and is intensely aware that if he doesn't bleed some of his aggression out, today is going to end badly. Aside from the fact that Dick really would frown on Jason shooting anyone (probably even non-lethally, the stick in the mud), Jason's perfectly aware that being the aggressor in a situation where they are hilariously outnumbered by members of a species with more advanced tech is a bad plan.

Instead he drags Dick out of bed two hours before the functions are set to begin and says, "Sparring, now."

Dick grins, his real grin, bright and eager and stupidly sweet. Jason informs him, "Your face is a travesty."

Dick's grin doesn't go anywhere, but he does aim a spinning kick at Jason's head. Jason ducks away, both to evade and to hide his own, answering, smile.

*

Jason makes it through the first half of the second day by the same sheer, unimpeded willpower and borderline panic that got him out of his own coffin, a type of blind determination to just survive. Somewhere in the middle of the day, he loses Dick. Oh, physically, the guy is still right here, in front of him, but Jason keeps trying to catch a glance of his eyes and when he finally does there's the finest sheen of calm engagement on the surface with a whole galaxy of nothing underneath.

Jason doesn't scare easily. It scares the shit out of him.

He pulls every lesson of diplomacy Bruce or Talia ever taught him up from the deep, where he's buried the knowledge, categorizing it as trivial but not entirely useless. He drags it up to the surface and wades in, putting himself between Dick and the ambassador with a conciliatory smile.

He comes up with excuses and lies and whatever the hell else he needs to explain that they're edging into his territory of expertise, and really, he should be the lead negotiator at this point. Then he pins the ambassador with his most slyly threatening smile and asks, "How about we start writing out the contract?"

*

It's not that Dick doesn't realize he's lost control of things. It's that watching Jay subtly menace their way into a trading treaty is mesmerizing. And, if he's being honest, for the first time since they arrived, when the ambassador smiled that too-slick smile and clasped both hands around Dick's in an obvious caress, Dick feels safe. Jay's a brick wall of a guy, and nothing is getting through him if he wants to stop it. He clearly wants to stop the ambassador.

Dick knows he should be pissed. He was handling the situation. And he's hardly some blushing flower who needs to be cared for. But even trying to work up the anger feels tiring, so he just doesn't.

By the time they retire for the evening, Dick's only had to speak up and nudge things in a certain direction four times. People forget how smart Jason is, how good he is at written language. Dick forgets it, even. In fairness, Jason fronts like nobody's business, but still. Dick thinks it's something he probably shouldn't forget.

Jason isn't only booksmart, which is a problem for Dick, at the moment. No sooner are they behind closed doors does he turn to Dick and ask, "What the hell is your damage?"

It smarts. Dick tenses up and finds himself on the offensive without even meaning to go there. " _My_ damage? You're the one out there playing jealous boyfriend. Jesus, Jason, it's just a little handsy flirting."

Jason goes still in a way that tells Dick he is walking a very thin line between Jason holding it together and losing it altogether. He watches, not moving, as Jason takes a slow breath and says, "Yeah? That what you would say if it were Tim? Or me? How about me?"

Dick opens his mouth to defend his position, but the mere idea of someone putting their hands on Jay without Jay being all right with that, when so many have done their best to hurt and even destroy him, makes it hard for Dick to breathe. 

Jason says, "Yeah," says, "look me in the fucking eye and tell me he'd still have his damn hands if he'd tried it with me, that you wouldn't be feeding them to him."

Dick takes a breath, tries to find some truth that he can feed Jason, something less inflammatory. He goes with, "It's just the job."

"No, it's not. And for all the many, many reasons I fault Bruce for the countless things wrong with both you and me, this isn't on him. I don't know who the fuck taught you that your body wasn't your own, that it was nothing to allow it to be used without so much as a by your leave, but they were an asshole."

Dick swallows down on a memory of the swell of sickness he'd felt upon learning it was Mirage who'd slept with him, not Kori, the sense of his own uselessness at not being able to push Catalina away from him. "It's not….it's not like that. Our bodies are just—it's not as if the ambassador could take anything important."

"But somehow it'd be important if it were me." Jason's voice is so flat it's nearly in Batman register. 

The echo of Bruce shakes something in Dick. He must hunch in on himself or do something that gives him away, because Jason's whole frame softens. Jason runs a hand over his face and says, "Let's get some sleep, yeah? Might as well take advantage of not needing to patrol."

"I'm gonna take a shower first," Dick tells him and brushes past Jason without waiting for a response.

*

Like the previous night, Dick takes longer in the shower than he should. Jason's all for making jokes about Dick's vanity, but he knows, real talk, that Dick is actually pretty efficient in his personal care. All the Bats are. Jason has seen Steph with icicles forming in her clearly-not-completely-dry hair during winter patrols. There's too much other shit to get done for personal grooming to be a time-suck.

Jason lets it go because he's pushed enough for both of them this evening. He's tired, too. He regrets that choice when he wakes to Dick leaping out of bed, silent except the rustle of sheets and harsh panting. Jason's woken for less.

"Hey," he says.

"Go back to sleep." Despite not screaming, Dick sounds like he's been swallowing gravel and glass for days.

"Sure, soon as you get in," Jason agrees, pulling the corner of his bedding up. 

Dick's blink is a slow thing. "You—you are not a cuddler."

It's more that maintaining some level of physical distance from Dick Grayson has been a matter of emotional survival and well-being for Jason since longer than he's willing to admit. Dick is a weakness Jason has always had and never been able to afford. "No. But your shoulders went down a solid six inches when I put myself in between you and what's-his-ballsac, so just—c'mon."

Even in the dimness of the room, Jason can see the way Dick's expression goes flat. "I don't need you to save me, I—"

"We all need someone to save us, sometimes. I'm sorry in your case that it's the failed Robin, if Kori could have been here, I have no doubt she'd have done a better job, but—"

"You're not a failure."

"That was what you got from that?"

"Yeah, Jay, that was—" Dick stops, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Who saved you?"

It takes Jason a second to follow the question. "First time? Bruce. Tell him I said that and I will rearrange your pretty-boy face. Second time? Talia, I guess, in her own way. Third time?" Jason shrugs. "Roy and Kori, at least in part. I'll tell you when we get to the fourth. I'm sure it's coming."

"Make you a deal. I get in that bed, you let it be me the fourth time Whatever it is, whatever you need, I get to be that."

Jason forces himself to say, "You have to be there for that work out, Dick."

"I know. I know what I’m promising." Dick takes a step toward the bed. "Take the deal, Jay."

Jason has learned many things over the span of his two lifetimes. Ninety percent of them involve not trusting Bats to be there when he needs them. But the last ten percent involve the possibilities that lie in leaps of faith. He tugs at the corner of the bedding. "You've got yourself a deal."

*

Dick wakes up tangled with Jason, the sturdy, warm bulk of him surrounding Dick. Dick murmurs, "Morning."

Jason runs a hand along Dick's spine. "Want me to let you loose on him, or run some more interference?"

Maybe it's the fact that Jason is asking, acknowledging that Dick could take care of himself, given the chance. Maybe it's that Jason has given Dick leave to haul Jason's ass out of trouble the next time he wanders into it. Or maybe it's just that Dick really likes watching Jason get his protective on. Whatever the reason, it's the easiest thing in the world to say, "Interfere away."

Dick can feel Jason smiling against the crown of Dick's head. Jason says, "Let's go get ourselves a trade agreement and blow this popsicle stand, yeah?"

Dick grins against the expanse of Jason's chest. "Yeah."


End file.
